When does your pension stay taxed in the Netherlands? The three pots and the three conditions

Whether your pension stays taxed in the Netherlands after you emigrate depends on which part of your pension it is. Fiscally it consists of three pots, each with its own rule:

• Your government pension, built up in the service of the state, usually stays taxed in the Netherlands.
• Your company pension goes to your country of residence. Under some treaties, such as those with Belgium, Germany and Poland, the Netherlands can still levy if three conditions apply at once. One of them is a threshold: in the treaty with Belgium € 25,000 a year. The treaty with Spain contains no such exception.
• Your AOW, the Dutch state pension, follows a rule of its own per treaty.

On almost every emigration page, this site included, there's the sentence that your pension is taxed in your new country of residence. That sentence is right by approximation, not in the details. And those details make the difference between a pleasant surprise and an additional assessment, a tax bill after the fact.

What is the framework: three pots, three rules?

Fiscally your "pension" isn't one thing but three, and each follows its own article in the tax treaty. Where you live, Dutch law determines "according to the circumstances", not by counting days.

Pot	Who may tax	Treaty article	Source-state threshold
Government pension — built up in the service of the state	the Netherlands; under some treaties (Belgium, Germany, Poland) not if you hold your country of residence's nationality	usually article 19	—
Company pension and annuity	your country of residence; under some treaties unless three conditions apply	usually article 18	Belgium € 25,000, Poland € 20,000, Germany € 15,000 a year
AOW	differs per treaty	its own provision, often in article 18	—

The article numbers are the usual ones; older treaties can differ. Read the articles of your treaty yourself. They're shorter than you think.

Pot 1 — why does a government pension stay Dutch?

This is the rule most often remembered wrongly, and the misconception is always the same: people think it's about the pension fund. It's about your employer. The treaty with Thailand says it literally, as an example: remuneration, "including pensions", paid by one of the states "in respect of services rendered to that State" in the discharge of governmental functions, "may be taxed in that State". If you worked for central government, a province, a municipality, the police, defence or public education, that part stays taxed in the Netherlands. If you live in Belgium, Germany or Poland and also hold that country's nationality, that does not apply, says NederlandWereldwijd. For France and Spain NederlandWereldwijd does not mention that exception.

Two misconceptions:

• Membership of the ABP, the pension fund for government and education, doesn't automatically make a pension Dutch. What counts is to whom the service was rendered.
• Whoever worked fifteen years for a municipality and twenty for a company has two pots you calculate separately.

Pot 2 — company pension: country of residence, unless?

The main rule is simple, and the treaty with Thailand shows what it looks like: pensions "in consideration of past employment" and annuities are "taxable only in that State". That State means the state of residence. In newer treaties the Netherlands negotiates an exception to that, because it granted relief on the contributions at the time. The Belastingdienst itself works out the treaty with Belgium as an example. Under it the Netherlands may only levy if all three conditions apply at once:

1. The accrual was tax-facilitated in the Netherlands: the entitlement was exempt, or the contributions were deductible.
2. The country of residence taxes the payout insufficiently: not at the normal rate for income from work, or less than 90 percent of the amount is taken into the levy.
3. The amount exceeds a threshold: in the Belgian treaty € 25,000 per calendar year, counted over the part that meets conditions 1 and 2. In the year of your move only the pension from the foreign period counts for that, not the whole year.

That threshold differs per treaty: NederlandWereldwijd names € 15,000 for Germany, € 20,000 for Poland and € 25,000 for Belgium. If you have a modest company pension, you don't reach the threshold and you pay in your country of residence. If you have a large pension and move to a country with a favourable pension regime, condition 2 is precisely in view. Then the Netherlands can still levy.